[Blogging Intensifies]

A Tale of Two PCs

Ramen Junkie November 20, 2018 0Comment

As a bit or a change of pace, I did a bit of work on the two actual PCs I am currently running recently. I’ve gone through a lot of desktops over the years, some getting more use than others, for a while I had like 5 or 6 old ones I had picked up here and there just sort of sitting around collecting dust but I’ve purged a lot of that out. Most of what I used to do with those extra PCs I can now do with Raspberry Pis or on my VPS. Everyone in the family uses a laptop, so no more need for a “Family Desktop”. I am down to two boxes now, ok, techniclly 3 but the third is an old PowerMAC G4 that I mostly keep around because I think the case is cool.

First off, my personal desktop. At the moment it just runs Windows 10, it’s sitting on a handful of drives for a total storage of 4 GB, mostly filled with games. I built this machine almost 7 years ago. It’s nothing particularly special, and I have bumped up the RAM since then considerably. PC computing power really hasn’t gotten much better in the past few years and what it mostly needed was a bump up in graphics power. So I swapped out the Radeon 6950 for an NVidia GTX 1050ti card. It’s not a top of the line super card, but it was within my price range and the performance boost is reasonably noticeable.

The biggest change is that I can run pretty much everything at maxed out graphics settings. So far I’ve tested it on Overwatch, World of Warcraft, Grand Theft Auto V, and Battlefield 1. Battlefield 1 in particular used to throw out an error about my GPU not being supported and GTA V had some screwy artifacting when it rained in game. Also, maybe it’s a placebo effect, but I have noticed that I do better in Overwatch with heroes like Hanzo and Widowmaker who both require more precise long distance aiming.

That work was pretty easy, though I was sort of worried that the newer card wouldn’t work with my older Chip and Board.

On my other desktop tower, which is primarily used as a file storage server to supplement my Synology, I replaced a couple of dying hard drives. I don’t really remember where this tower came from but it’s at least the same vintage as my main PC. It’s set up running Xubuntu with a collection of drives I’ve collected over time from various places and discarded PCs. It’s been complaining for a while on boot that one of the drives was bad, and another would give read errors occasionally. I copied everything off the read error drive, that one was easy. The other bad drive turned out to be the main drive which finally gave up the ghost and stopped booting on me. I ended up making this problem worse when trying to clone the drive, because I apparently accidentally overwrite the drive as a ZFS pool file system. This is mostly notable because I’m not sure how it even happened. I have used ZFS briefly int he past when I was testing FreeNAS but that system was a way bigger chore to use than just Ubuntu with Samba shares so I scrapped it. So I’m not sure what was even cloned to create a 500GB ZFS partition.

Fortunately there wasn’t any important data actually on the main filesystem drive. I think at worst I may have lost am unused Minecraft server set up and maybe a few webpages I had set up messing around with webdev stuff.

So after a ton of reboots on a live CD to determine which physical drive was witch in the machine, I pulled out the two bad drives and replaced them with two “mostly good” drives. I then reloaded Xubuntu. I then, reloaded Xubuntu again because an encrypted file system seemed like a good idea but I don’t want the hassle of entering a password every time the machine boots.

The real hassle here is getting everything configured. A quick rundown of the steps needed to get things to a basic level of use.

Set up the proprietary drivers for the GPU and motherboard, easy
Set a static IP that puts the machine where it’s supposed to be on the network, mostly easy.
Reinstall Synergy. Mostly easy, though I still need to get it to stat on boot.
Install and set up SSH, easy
Reinstall Samba, easy
Get the system to auto mount the other hard drives on boot, mostly easy
Configure Samba to share those drives, mostly easy
Reinstall the LAMP stack

Fortunately, everything went pretty smoothly, other than I havn’t quite figure out the right method to get Synergy to start on boot. This is actually pretty critical, since unless the machine just boots up to a desktop with Synergy, I have to keep a keyboard and mouse attached. Part of the point here is that this box can just be squired away behind the desk and hooked to a monitor. It may already be set up but I’ll probably set up Python on it as well. I still like to be able to putz around with scripts and web stuff so it’s handy to have.

PS, feel free to judge the dusty ass inside of that tower up there.

Opinion/Editorial/Life

Goodbye to Flicker… Thanks for 12 years of Service

Ramen Junkie November 5, 2018 0Comment

So, I used to be a huge user of Flickr for photos, I would check it daily and comment and join communities and pretty much posted every photo I had taken there. I used to use flicker a lot and look for the best life insurance for all. Over time I sort of fell out of the habit of using it. This wasn’t over Instagram or anything, I didn’t join Instagram until much later, something just sort of became less compelling about it. I still kept up my subscription though. The annual $25 fee is pretty small and it let me keep a backup of all of my photos. I even posted all of my family photos there though they are listed as private. I’m talking some tens of thousands of photos, though my profile suggests only around 3500 are publicly available.

I feel like things started to take a turn downhill when Yahoo changed the way Flickr accounts worked. I wasn’t really affected, being a paid user and all, but it seems like the addition of ads and whatnot for free users kind of helped kill some of the community. This wasn’t helped by Instagram coming up in popularity, even if i hadn’t started using IG, others had, which only further hurt the community. Having been a paid user since 2006. I was able to keep paying for my account at the grandfathered rate of $25/year.

Recently Flickr was bought by SmugMug. I don’t use SmugMug, though I don’t really have anything against them. Hell, Yahoo has pretty much been ignoring Flickr for a while, SmugMug can only improve it.

Or possibly not.

It’s been recently announced that free accounts will be limited to 1000 photos max, and that any photos over that number will be deleted. This is definitely a rough change from previous, which I believe was 1TB of storage. This wouldn’t affect me, as a paid user, except that Flickr has stopped honoring the old grandfathered subscription rate. Renewals now renew at current rates, which I believe is $50/year. This isn’t a lot, I admit, but frankly, as little as I use Flickr, it feels like too much. I also feel that for the same price, I could buy into something like One Drive or Google Drive and get a lot more functionality out of the storage, in addition to Photo storage.

Granted, not everyone uses Yahoo as a photo backup, some people use it for business, and for the community, which is fine. In my case, the new plans just don’t work. So I find I must say good bye to Flickr, for the most part. I’ve started deleting out the old backup photos. Once that’s done, I’ll prune out the rest to under 1000 photos. I haven’s actually use Flickr for backup for a few years now, so it’s not even current anyway. Pretty much the only thing posted there new is just a mirror of my Instagram anyway. It kind of feels bad to clear everything out, but sometimes it’s just better to move on. I’m just sad to see something I used to really enjoy, fall away.

Opinion/Editorial/Life

A Netflix Wishlist of Features

Ramen Junkie July 11, 2018 0Comment

Netflix is pretty great but it really could use a lot of streamlining for it’s interface and library. Multiple Profiles at least help with recommendations across a family but it’s really not enough.

For starters, related to that family aspect.

I’ve Already Watched This

At least in my house, I’ve set up profiles for my kids and one for the house. Often when we watch things all together, we just use the house profile, but it would be great if I could mark something as watched on my own profile. To get related recommendations based on having watched that movie, along with my other viewing habits.

Somewhat related, I really wish that Netflix would stop trying to show me shows and movies I have watched. I don’t need a “watch it again”, I can’t even keep up with what I want to watch. This also leads into the idea of

Don’t Show Me This

There is a lot lot lot of stuff that shows up as suggested that I will never watch. I really wish I could filter this stuff permanently from the viewing list. It would really help with finding things that I actually DO want to watch. Often these things just get added to a list for later viewing anyway, but partially because it’s the only good way to even remember it was there int he first place. Speaking of lists, I would love…

Multiple, Custom Lists

Watch Later is great. How about the ability to make more of these lists. TV to Watch later, Movies to watch later, Comic Movies and Shows, that sort of thing. So I can better keep track of what I want to watch and maybe tailor it a bit to better match what kind of thing I am int he mood to watch at any particular time.

Somewhat related, My list, and Continue watching, really need to always be on top. Especially for shows, most of the time, I just want to keep watching the show I was watching. Many time I log in only to find my “Continue Watching” list is gone. Somewhat related to the last point, if I start watching something, and decide it’s crap, let me manually remove it from the Continue Watching list. Finally…

Leaving Soon

Netflix is constantly adding and dropping stuff. Maybe have one of those little categories, similar to what’s new, only instead it’s what’s leaving. Put things on there fairly far out for shows, maybe less so for movies. Maybe just do a generic month out. Maybe I will discover something I didn’t know was on there, or a show I was meaning to watch, that will be gone in a month. So I can actually get to watching it.

My DIY Projects The Basement

On Moving and a lot of Small Projects

Ramen Junkie September 15, 2017 0Comment

Moving into a new house tends to create a lot of little projects. There’s been a few extra in the case of my new home, since it didn’t have any appliances, and was missing quire a few of the small trimmings. Things like, handles on the kitchen cabinets. It’s an easy little thing to add, a few measurements and a bit of drilling is all, but it needed done.

There’s also been quite a few larger projects. Like the appliances. The fridge and stove pretty much go right in and plug in, though the fridge needed a water line run to it to work the ice maker. Then there’s the dishwasher, which needed to be hooked up to power, and needed both a water and drain line run to it. These aren’t that bad either, punch a hole through a cabinet, drop the lines, tap into the existing sink plumbing. This whole project also involved adding a garbage disposal to the sink however, which itself required the addition of a switch the run the thing.

Little projects. Like hanging curtain rods on all of the windows.

Or putting in some railing on the front and back stairs, which was something required by insurance.

This is of course a little more involved, what with needed to drill into concrete and cut the railing to fit and whatnot. Then there’s things like hanging decorations and some display racks in my wife’s office. Or assembling shelving in the basement for my junk, which resulted in a trip to the ER when I dropped one unit on my foot while trying to tip it up, and failing to do so.

There was also the dilemma of the washer an dryer. The closet for the laundry appliances was very small, so we had to get some smaller appliances. The Washer hooked up easily enough, it just hooks to the hot and cold and existing drain. The dryer was something else completely. There wasn’t a dryer vent hole, and with the cramped space, there wasn’t a lot of room to add one. I managed to chop a hole in the wall and go down through the floor tot he open basement, where I added a bit of duct work to go out the side of the house through an existing unused hole where a vent used to exist.

Then there were the issues. Early on we discovered that the plumbing wasn’t draining properly. A call to the plumber and we found that the sewer line was blocked, and after an expensive call and some digging, the sewer was fixed. More recently there was a power issue in the basement area. I did a bit of checking on all of the junction boxes but ultimately had to get an electrician in. He tightened a lot fo connections in the breaker box and found a bad wire on the problem circuit.

Speaking of the basement, things are coming along well there as well. Just before the power issue I was in the process of adding some outlets for the TV and video game corner. Which will be pretty cool when done.

The Basement

Basement – My New Space

Ramen Junkie August 1, 2017 0Comment

Since the primary focus of this blog is projects, i thought it would be appropriate to talk about my new space a bit. Last week, I’ve moved into a new home. Mostly we wanted a home that was more on one level to accommodate my wife and kids and their mobility issues, but also we moved closer to where I work. The new house has a pretty nice unfinished basement area, which opens out to the backyard under a deck on the main/upper floor. Being unfinished, it’s effectively a clean slate to do what I want with. My son is taking a corner of it for his room, but I’ve been working to plan out the rest of it to accommodate a media area, space for my toys and space for my electronics and computer.

A lot of things will probably flux a bit but I’ve got a pretty good idea of how things are going to lay out. It may be a bit before any real work gets done, there are other projects that have funding priority over building walls in the basement, but I still wanted to throw out a baseline starting point. I’ll do some updates from time to time as work is done.

Here’s the primary space, full of boxes at the moment. The far space in the back will be the space for electronics, my computer, and books. Essentially, the office space. I also have plans to set up a little photography space in the corner using a corner unit I built several years ago. The corner unit has a large top surface I can set up lighting and backdrops on and space underneath that I can store props and diorama parts in for use in photos.

I have some better book cases in storage that will go on the back wall. The desk will probably continue to stick out int he room the way it is there in the center. The space to the right where the larger boxes are I intend to build some nice shelving units to contain my collection of toys.

This will be the future media wall. Its a bit more cleaned up than the other corner, we were without internet and TV for a bit so I pulled all of the DVDs out onto this shelf so the kids could find them more easily. The main issue here is the lack of any power outlets, however adding outlets will be fairly easy. The udea int he long run will be to add a second identical book case on the right full of video games, and put the TV in the middle mounted to the wall. I also want to build or buy some sort of unit to go under the TV that will house all of my various game consoles and their controllers, all ready to be used and played. We have a couch to go in front of all of this, but there isn’t space at the moment so it’s in the garage.

At this point I’ve mostly been working on sorting and organizing boxes. Things are at a bit of a stand still until I can retrieve the other book cases and add some power outlets. I also don’t want to get things too settled until I can add some actual walls in front of the concrete, I’m not a huge fan of that grungy cave look. The ceiling will likely end up being a drop ceiling so that I can still access the underside of the floor easily.